Treating You As a Product

Fast Company: Apple Explains How It’s Making Siri Smart Without Endangering User Privacy

Joswiak argues that Siri can be every bit as helpful as other assistants without accumulating a lot of personal user data in the cloud, as companies like Facebook and Google are accustomed to doing. “We’re able to deliver a very personalized experience . . . without treating you as a product that keeps your information and sells it to the highest bidder. That’s just not the way we operate.”

How Siri learns—and how much personal data it needs to be effective—is of utmost importance to Apple: Future updates to Siri will give it an increasingly central role in our interactions with all kinds of Apple products.

Craig Federighi, the company’s senior vice president of software, wrote in an email to Fast Company that “Siri is no longer just a voice assistant . . . Siri on-device intelligence is streamlining everyday interactions with our devices.” Apple teams have “worked to make it a core part of all of our platforms”—iOS, MacOS, tvOS, watchOS, and HomePod.

I don’t know that I’d claim Siri is as good as, say, Google Assistant, but she’s almost as good. And I’m willing to trade that minor gap in helpfulness for more control over my privacy any day.